ddurant

...then send him a check (or a TY anyway) because, really, most of us wouldn't be here doing this stuff without his years of work. G1 X-11.02 Y0.11 Z0.3 F3000.0 E107.691this is only the beginning, then it continues the rest with this: ;M103M104 S245.0M104 S243.058G1 X-11.4 Y0.11 Z1.0 F68.353 M104 is the code to Set Temperature. This is followed by some slow movement commands so it's probably doing orbits, which are used to waste time while the extruder gets to the new temperature. 1: go through the temperature module and just set all the values to the same number - try 230.. The 245 you have in there is probably hotter than you want 2: still in Temperature, set both the heating and cooling rates to 100. This esentially tells SF that you don't want to wait for temperature changes 3: in Cool, change Cool Type to 'Slow Down' 4: tell us how/if that worked

It's "doable" in SF. But it's not a simple "switch you turn on/off". You'll have to make a "support_start.gcode" and "support_end.gcode" which switch to the support extruder. ...If you use the same material for support as you do for the rest of the object, SF already does this. The trick is telling it to print support structures at a lower density and enabling it is just a couple easy(ish) settings.. It's pretty dated but I wrote about this a couple years ago. This was with a crappy makerbot DC extruder - what we have today is a lot more flexible.. edit: and, if we do move to dual extruders on Ultimaker, the setup isn't really that much harder. Somebody makes good support_start/_end.gcode files then everybody else just plug 'em in. It's really not a big deal.

Almost definitely caused by your motor losing some steps. Common causes for this include: - your x/y rods not being lube'ed - too much extrusion, which can cause a blob and mess things up when the head smacks into it - too fast feed rate..

Nice! On my batch-1 machine, the bolts on the motors didn't grab really well. A few heating/cooling cycles (on the old motors, which got pretty hot) and the short belts would end up getting loose again. A couple washers on each bolt (on the outside of the machine) fixed that up and I haven't had that problem since.

Dunno - I haven't printed via netfabb yet..

In 20 words or less, what is your best tip for new users? Me: don't leave the machine sitting around hot - if you're not printing, the heater should be off.

Also, don't leave your machine hot when it's not printing.. When I'm starting up a print, I get EVERYTHING ready then start the preheat and start printing right away, once it gets to temperature. If you leave it hot when not printing, the heat will move up the hot end and encourage the plug that Daid mentions..

He's certainly figured things out but I think he did those things while still pretty much a newbie. For the heatsink, the original Ultimaker kits came with smaller motors. These worked fine but could get really hot on long prints. A number of people put heatsinks and/or fans on them to keep the temperature down - I put fans on mine, not because it made the machine better but because I was sick of touching the motors by mistake. Not hot enough to actually damage skin but I sure knew it when I touched one. Ultimaker started including bigger motors around October or so, which run far cooler. I upgrade my machine to use these for about US$20/motor and now, even after like 5 hours of continuous printing, the motors are just over room temperature.. So.. Worthwhile investment for batch-1 machines, already fixed on new machines.

Some of the pix here will make you drool, too.. http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2011/10 ... of-prints/ Paul Candler is the one that did the headlining pictures. I'm not sure what he does for a living but I do remember him saying that the Ultimaker is his first printer and he'd only had it a couple months before doing that print. I think one of the big problems new people have is that they hear Ultimaker can do crazy fast speeds and really high resolution so they try to start with BOTH of those, which turns out to mostly just make messes. There are always trade-offs in speed vs quality.. If you take your time and have realistic expectations then yes, you can do stuff like this.

Surprisingly not. RepG was really designed for pre-5D machines and 'Extruder On' wants to just send a simple M gcode saying to turn the extruder on until you poke 'Extruder Off'. Somebody (Erik?) changed that on 5D machines to do (what I guess is) a series of G1 E commands that simulate the same thing. With volumetric 5D, the extrusion length E suddenly means something different - extrude a lot more, in particular. If the firmware is buffering up commands, which a G1 can do, you can end up sitting around for a while, watching it extrude and waiting for the queue to drain. So.. GreenPlease: the repg stuff is normal repg weirdness.. Don't worry about it. As for humidity, I just went through about 5 pounds of PLA that I bought almost 2 years ago. I'm in New England, not Florida, so the humidity here is a lot less but it was just sitting on the shelf for nearly 2 years. No bag, no desiccant.. Have you measured the filament with calipers? Average diameter, how much diameter varies and if it's circular or oval are the things to look at.. Usual numbers are around 2.85 and circular is better than oval. If you're far off spec or it varies a lot, that can cause problems.

I'd definitely start with less agressive settings until you get something working then move up. Maybe try 0.4mm-0.6mm thread widths and 50-100mm/s speeds.. Even that may be too fast for a 0.02mm layer - maybe try 20-50mm/s first. I suspect it's not really any individual setting combination that can cause problems - it's more like about the rate of change from one setting to another, within a print. A 0.4mm thread at 20mm/s is about 1/25th the extruder speed of 0.7mm at 300mm/s. These are VERY different settings that you're allowing in the same print... Eventually, I think slicers will get smart enough to compensate for this and do sortofa more-gradual ramp from one setting to the next. We're not there yet, though.

Nozzle size is different than positioning resolution. While the thinnest line you can make may be 0.4mm, you can position that line with far more detail than 0.4mm.

Or use this: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=194

If I wanted wire clips, I would print some! Go away!!

1: don't heat up to 250 - that's too hot. I'm using 225 now, which works well on my machine. Starting with the machine cold, heat up to 230 and watch for plastic oozing out of the nozzle - a few (or maybe 10) degrees above the temperature that it starts doing that is a good place to start. 2: if you're slicing with skeinforge, check the Temperature module. For now, just set all the values to the same number.

Interesting.. It's probably tripping over using , instead of . as a decimal point. That would explain why moves over 1mm work but moves under 1mm don't. I'd bet good money that if you told it to move 1,99mm, it would move 1mm because the arduino sees , as a non-numeric character and stops reading. You can: A: ignore it - it's a control panel bug and gcode from slicers will work fine, or 2: mess with your system so that it uses . as a decimal instead of ,

I don't understand.. Do you mean that you see the setting to jog at 0.5mm but it doesn't do anything or that you don't see it at all? Did you download repg from the ultimaker site? edit: if you want, you can do File->Preferences menu, set the debugging level to ALL, try the jog again then set the debugging level back to whatever it was. Copy the text from the bottom of repg and paste it here.. I also don't have one in the control panel. I think that's normal..

Some type of cast/mold system? What would work best probably depends on the specifics of what you're doing..

The E steps on pre-volumetric 5D systems is the number of extruder steps needed to get 1mm out of the nozzle.. There are a number of things wrong with measuring that way which is why it changed to be the number of steps to get 1mm into the extruder for volumetric 5D. I (still) think the E component of G1 should change yet again to be the volume of the thread but there isn't any firmware or slicer that supports that yet..

Howdy! This looks a lot like "can a $2k printer perform as well as a $50k+ printer?" and, sadly, the answer is that it probably can't.. The first object can be done but you'd want to get reversal right before trying it. The gaps between solid bits being small mean that stringing won't be horrible but you'd probably still get some. The 2nd object would need support material, which would be a real pain to remove since it would be on the inside of the object. The 3rd object looks doable but you'd want to be very well calibrated first. I'd be tempted to write my own gcode generator for something like that, since each layer is the same and you'd really want to minimize travel moves. SF sometimes goes a little weird on object like this, printing one bit then moving a long way to do the next bit then coming back to the start to do the next one, etc..

For that sorta volume, you definitely wouldn't want to print them one at a time. You could probably make a plate so that 10 get printed at a time but, still, that's 3 long prints a day, 7 days a week.. Yep.

There are 2 big bits to the UM electronics: the Arduino Mega and the RAMPS shield. The RAMPS board looks like this, http://arduino.cc/en/uploads/Main/ArduinoMega.jpg . The Mega is the brains - it's got a CPU and is the electronics bit that runs the firmware and is powered by the USB connection. The RAMPS board, though cool, has no brain and is powered by the power brick. The LED on the print head is also powered by the Mega so if the Mega is on, the LED should be on too. The fan on the electronics is connected to the RAMPS board so if that's got power, that fan is on. The Mega may be able to change the speed of that fan but it's really powered by the RAMPS board. What you're describing all sounds normal to me...

I've heard that they're past feature-freeze so at this point, it's testing and bug fixing.. Hopefully it will be soon!

This isn't entirely right.. A 0.4mm nozzle may have a minimum thread width of 0.4mm (or slightly less) but the upper limit is defined by the entire diameter of the nozzle tip, not the size of the opening.. For a 1.5mm wall with a 0.4mm nozzle, you could do three 0.5mm lines. The real problem comes in (for a 0.4mm nozzle) when you've got an area that's over 0.8mm and under 1.2mm or between 2x and 3x the min thread wdith. You end up taking 0.8mm of width up by the perimeter lines and are left with needing infill smaller than the minumum thread width. In these cases, SF will leave the area empty.

More info would be good here.. Which version of SF are you using, layer height, perimeter and infill w/t values, fill infill perimeter overlap, feed rate..